Justin Swaddle – Leeds

A pervert who forced 117 girls to self-harm, perform sexual acts on themselves and carve his alias on their bodies has been jailed for just two years.

Justin Swaddle, now 20, led a campaign of violence in a Com group, an online community that shares extreme graphic material and manipulates victims to commit violent and sexual child abuse.

Members of these disturbing online groups mainly consist of teenage boys vying for attention and notoriety rather than sexual desire.

The more extreme the crimes and abuse committed, the more status a young person operating in these forums will achieve.

Swaddle’s devices were found to contain alarming images of victims self-harming and carving his aliases into their skin, according to the National Crime Agency (NCA).

The sexual deviant from Meanwood, Leeds, groomed young girls on Snapchat, Discord and Telegram under the usernames ‘Epstein’, ‘Rugen’ and ‘Moscow’.

Danielle Pownall, Operations Manager at the NCA said: ‘Justin Swaddle targeted young and vulnerable victims all over the world to abuse and scare them into carrying out shocking self-harm and sexual activity, purely to gain popularity with his peers online.’

Swaddle was jailed for two years after a police investigation revealed he had communicated with 117 female victims aged 13 to 17.

Eight of his victims lived in the UK. Ms Pownall continued: ‘He gained the trust of his victims, before collecting private information about them so he could threaten to share their intimate images or report them to their school or parents to incite further content.’

One of Swaddle’s victims said the two met on the social media platform Discord in November 2022 before they moved to Snapchat.

The conversation quickly became sexual and escalated to discussions about self-harm. Swaddle requested that the victim send nude images of herself to him and carve his username on her body, according to the NCA.

He also obtained her name, home address and school details and shared recordings of calls where sexual activity had taken place with a chat group.

Swaddle then threatened to use the girl’s personal details if she did not send more explicit videos and images with him.

Other chat logs from the messenger app Telegram showed he had attempted to make a child sexually abuse another child and record it for him.

Again he threatened to share indecent images he had already obtained if his depraved request was not completed.

His devices contained indecent images of children in category C and category A, the most severe level.

Detectives estimated the images on Swaddle’s devices showed children aged between three and 17